Yuki Takahashi

Since STEM fields in colleges are male-dominated, female students may choose not to enter them to avoid being a minority. Using an incentivized discrete choice experiment, we study whether the gender ratio at colleges affects high school students' college choices and whether the low female share in STEM contributes to talent misallocation. We show that the gender ratio at colleges affects both female and male students' college choices: they prefer gender-balanced programs over those with a male or female majority, and prefer being a majority over a minority. Students avoid being a minority mainly because they expect it to be difficult to fit into such environments. Because of these preferences, the low female share in STEM decreases female students' STEM choice probabilities, especially among those with high mathematics ability, and leads to male students with low mathematics ability crowding out female students with high mathematics ability. These preferences and the resulting talent misallocation provide an additional rationale for policies to close the gender gap in STEM.

The persistent underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is well documented, with substantial variation across disciplines. Using a quasi-experimental research design, we study a curricular reform in an introductory computer science (CS) course and accompanying cultural shifts within the CS department at a U.S. liberal arts college. We find that emphasizing the breadth and social relevance of the discipline significantly increased female students’ likelihood of majoring in CS by 13 percentage points relative to male students. The reform also improved labor market outcomes: compared to the pre-reform period, female students exposed to the new curriculum experienced earnings growth about 13\% faster than their male peers. These gains were not accompanied by declines in academic performance for either gender, as measured by GPA or dropout rates. If anything, male students’ GPAs rose modestly. Finally, we explore the underlying mechanisms and find that the reform boosted female representation in CS through three channels: improving retention and persistence among women who intended to major in CS, attracting more women who intended to major in CS at the time of admission, and encouraging women who had not initially planned to pursue the field to switch to CS after entering college.

While successful teamwork often involves correcting colleagues' mistakes, it may have negative interpersonal consequences. In an experiment, I show that it also has negative economic consequences: individuals are less willing to collaborate with those who have corrected them, even when the correction benefits the team. The data are consistent with negative feedback aversion: individuals who initially received positive feedback about their ability are significantly less willing to collaborate with those who corrected their mistakes, but not with those who corrected their right actions. Additionally, I find that men, but not women, are more tolerant of women who corrected their right actions. It is potentially due to men's beliefs about women's abilities, making women's corrections of their right actions less ego-threatening. This reluctance to work with those who provide corrective feedback can undermine teamwork, and mixed-gender teams may attract less competent women due to gendered sorting.

Light abuses and threats to receive them at home can deteriorate individuals' well-being, even in the absence of severe physical injury. Leveraging Russia's criminal law reform that decriminalized minor domestic violence, I first confirm that the number of domestic violence incidents classified as criminal offenses against female partners indeed decreased sharply after the reform. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I then show that the reform reduced married women's life satisfaction, increased depression, and increased college-educated married women's alcohol intake. Suggestive evidence indicates that the reform contributed to a decline in new marriages, while the divorce rate remained unchanged. These changes are unlikely to stem from shifts in violence outside the household, as there were no significant changes in gender-based violence or other crimes during the same period. These findings suggest that even minor intimate partner violence decreases married women's well-being and highlights the importance of legal institutions in addressing household violence.

Although evidence suggests men are more generous to women than to men, it may stem from paternalism and could reverse when women excel in important skills for one's career success, such as cognitive skills. Using a dictator game, this paper studies whether male dictators allocate less to female receivers than to male receivers when these receivers have higher IQs than dictators. By exogenously varying the receivers' IQ relative to the dictators', I do not find evidence consistent with this hypothesis; if anything, male dictators allocate slightly more to female receivers with higher IQs than to male receivers with equivalent IQs. The results hold both in mean and distribution and are robust to the so-called ``beauty premium.'' Also, female dictators' allocations are qualitatively similar to male dictators. These findings suggest that women who excel in cognitive skills may not receive less favorable treatment than equally intelligent men in the labor market.